Why a career in science? When I was little, I used to ask my mother why this and why that. Sometimes she'd get frustrated with me. I've always wanted to know why. When I was in 7th grade, I took a physical sciences course and said: This is it. This is the science I want to do. It was a real eye-opener. I knew what I wanted to do early on.

As a child of "why?" you can always answer "Because of this" - not just "Because." The little answers add up to a bigger solution that can really affect people's lives. Physics explains at a more fundamental level how things work. If you take chemistry, geology, biology, astronomy, cosmology - just about anything - and you keep carrying it back, you get to physics. However, my math friends say if you carry it back even further it either becomes mathematics or religion!

What is your perspective on women in science?

Shinn sets the path length of the autocorrelator in the FEL User Facility's optics control room.

Women tend to be excluded from the physics ranks. Much of this is cultural. The cultural climate can switch you off from high-tech stuff. It's still not considered feminine in our culture to pop the top off a piece of equipment and mess around inside. Although, at our house, my mom and I used to fix air conditioners, heaters and garbage disposals together.

In the United States, a girl's interest in science depends on how she is treated in the home, in grade and middle school and in high school. In terms of teaching physics at the college level, I think the U.S. and Great Britain are among the countries with the lowest percentages of women faculty - about five percent.

The bias has been unconscious in many ways and overall, seems to be decreasing. I personally haven't experienced bias here at the Lab. We have a younger staff. They're more used to female scientists. And they may have a spouse in a technical field. Or they went to school with women physicists.

What brought you to Jefferson Lab?

I came here in 1994 as a visiting research scientist from Bryn Mawr College, where I was an associate professor of physics. Six years earlier, when I arrived at Bryn Mawr, there were a lot of expectations that I conduct research and teach, both of which I loved and wanted to do. But when you combined the two, I was working 90 hours a week. There was no time to have a social life. I said to myself: This is ridiculous. There weren't enough hours in a day or days in a week to do it all. So here I am.

What attracted you to a career in laser development and research?

When I was in college I realized I would work with lasers for the rest of my life. It's a practical, beneficial technology that derives from basic physics. That's the best place to be for me.

A lot's happened in the last 10 years in terms of lasers. You now have a bunch of little lasers that work in telecommunications, in laser printers, in CD-ROMs and in DVDs. Then you have big lasers like the FEL. When you think about it, the JLab FEL is pretty amazing. It came on-line in just two years.

What is your perspective on the FEL?

I go to these conferences on laser applications and people are constantly talking about getting the weight of a car down. If we can scale up the FEL as we think we can, it will be possible to really affect the way a car is manufactured, from making components lighter to making them stronger and more corrosion-resistant.

We've shown that high average power is possible with an FEL built around an SRF accelerator with energy recovery. Soon we'll be taking the next step: 10 kilowatts of power. One of the big goals is to make an FEL capable of megawatts.

One of the greatest things about research is becoming involved in new fields. For me, the new area is ultrafast physics, which is the physics occurring when a beam of light hits a material and then observing how that material reacts in the first trillionth of a second.

I'm having so much fun with this because the FEL is the next technology in lasers. It is an enormous advance. How many people in the world are building optics for high-average-power FELs? It's certainly not many. If you get right down to it, we're the only ones in the world with this kind of FEL. It's a really stimulating environment. What a thrill! I'm really lucky.

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of stories from the individual perspectives of Lab staff.

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